According to the global growth of the “Blue economy”, coastal zones are under pressure from both land and marine side economic activities. The fragmentation of sectorial interests and legislation along the coasts has led to the need for bridging knowledge (data/information and methods/tools) and governance (decision-makers at every level) in order to ensure sustainable economic development and social and ecosystem resilience. This poses the need for an interaction process that associates user needs to the European and national legislative framework to create a policy-oriented demand of Copernicus Earth Observation services in coastal areas. Such goals need a strong and effective system to monitor compliance and to assess the progress of the legislation. This study aims at identifying potential gaps in the current Copernicus product offer for the monitoring of the coastal sector through the elicitation of stakeholder requirements. The methodology is applied to the Italian landscape of users, but it is scalable at European level. The results provide a clear overview of the coastal user requirements, highlighting the common need of integrated information for the management, and represents the basis for defining the coastal services.

Deltaic systems are broadly recognized as vulnerable hot spots at the interface between land and sea and are highly exposed to harmful natural and manmade threats. The vulnerability to these threats and the interactions of the biological, physical, and anthropogenic processes in low-lying coastal plains, such as river deltas, requires a better understanding in terms of vulnerable systems and to support sustainable management and spatial planning actions in the context of climate change. This study analyses the potential of Bayesian belief network (BBN) models to represent conditional dependencies in vulnerability assessment for future sea level rise (SLR) scenarios considering ecological, morphological and social factors using Earth observation (EO) time series dataset. The BBN model, applied in the Po Delta region in the northern Adriatic coast of Italy, defines relationships between twelve selected variables classified as driver factors (DF), land cover factors (LCF), and land use factors (LUF) chosen as critical for the definition of vulnerability hot spots, future coastal adaptation, and spatial planning actions to be taken. The key results identify the spatial distribution of the vulnerability along the costal delta and highlight where the probability of vulnerable areas is expected to increase in terms of SLR pressure, which occurs especially in the central and southern delta portion.

Here we take the example of Italy to demonstrate a country-level approach to the design of a sustainable system of Earth Observation (EO)-based products to match the demand/supply for monitoring coastal zones and to guide the development of new products based on national/local users’ needs complementary to Copernicus Core Services products and its future development. With support from the Coastal Thematic Consultation Board of the Italian Copernicus User Forum, we applied a standardized methodology involving elicitation, selection, analysis, validation, and requirement management. Our findings reveal a strong national need in EO-based products for coastal monitoring and services provision. The survey results offer insights into how existing products and services meet user needs on the national scale, for monitoring several parameters pertaining to four classes, biological, geomorphological, physical, and chemical, highlighting additional demands and integration opportunities with the evolving European Copernicus Coastal Hub. The innovation of this work lies in the design of a foundation for a holistic approach to complement European and national EO systems, both in terms of data to be acquired with synergistic satellite missions and in situ infrastructures and in terms of the development of sustainable products, models, and algorithms for downstream value-added services.